Best of the Marijuana
Marijuana is a drug with some hazards, it would be strange if there were a drug with no hazards because we don’t know of any drug that has no hazards but of all the psychoactive drugs, that people have taken all along the way, Marijuana is the safest. Now, this does not mean that one can get high and expect to function the way one does normally.
Cannabis is a plant that grows naturally and is used in many different industries and even in traditional Chinese medicine for thousands of years.
There are a lot more articles and research done in the scientific literature on the medical uses of cannabis. More than a hundred different compounds are found in the marijuana plant which is remarkable for their medical applicability.
Researchers in California have found that cannabis is a particularly good treatment for pain and it is in fact the THC that is so powerful. There is a compound in the marijuana plant called CBD or cannabidiol that can be able to control seizures. There was one study on it published in 1980. CBD is remarkable, unlike THC it doesn’t get you high. Researchers in Israel learned that nearly half of the patients with Crohn’s disease who use medical cannabis no longer have any symptoms of the disease at all.
Also, there are tantalizing early indications from the research on the plant, that some of the compounds found in the Marijuana plant may someday be used to treat cancer. Marijuana is not a panacea or a cure-all but the medical community is now beginning to recognize that cannabis may play an important role in taking care of patients for whom conventional therapies aren’t working very well.
The most remarkable part of the plant is CBD, but it actually makes up a really tiny portion of the commercial market. The real money is being made by the other chemical THC. The THC is the natural part of the plant that gets you high.
The dark side of the commercial Marijuana
Before 1970 cannabis contain less than half of the percent of THC, that’s what’s naturally occurring. Over the last 40 years, that percentage of THC started to slowly but steadily rise until recently as the chemists started to get involved. So, these guys moved to growth cycles and they made growth cycles extremely and unnaturally short. They also started to use pesticides and fertilizers. Some companies that manufacture cannabis products actually encouraged their employees to wear hazmat suits because of the high use of chemicals to grow cannabis.
The products that are being sold today can contain above 30 percent of THC. Also, some product concentrates can actually contain above 95 percent THC. A far cry from the natural plant. This isn’t the natural plant anymore in some cases. If you ever set foot inside one of the thousands of dispensaries that have sprung up in recent years, most of them really selling in them is THC.
All of the weed that you buy commercially lists exactly how much THC it contains, like vape pens, coffee, ice cream, candy, and pretty much anything that you can imagine introducing into the human body. The vast majority of cannabis that’s being sold today isn’t really cannabis. It is THC in either a pure form or in an extremely high and unnatural concentration.
To say that we have legalized weed is subtly misleading. The truth is we have commercialized THC and it’s happened really quickly. Now the reason why the commercial market has so rapidly exploded is that there is a hell of a lot of money to be made in satisfying and increasing our desire to get high. The companies know that the best way to continue to profit off of us is if they follow the alcohol industry.
Source: TEDx Talks
Previous Article: Why people risk their lives to skin bleaching
